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Chapter 1
Psychology, Critical Thinking, and Science

What psychology is, what it tries to do, how the scientific method works, why critical thinking matters, research ethics, and how the field got here.

Notes

Tap a section to open it. Highlighted words are the ones most likely to show up on a test.

What is psychology? Part 1
  • Psyche is Greek for mind. Logos means knowledge or study.
  • Psychology is the scientific study of overt behavior and covert behavior (internal mental processes).
  • It is applied to mental health, business, education, sports, law, medicine, and the design of machines.

Overt vs covert behavior

  • Overt behavior is directly observable. Talking, eating, sleeping.
  • Covert behavior is subjective mental events. Dreaming, thinking, remembering, decision making.

Seeking knowledge

  • Introspection is examining your own thoughts, feelings, and sensations. You are the only one who can directly observe your own mind.
  • Problem: introspection is full of biases. Psychology today must be based on objective scientific observation instead.
  • Psychology answers questions systematically, like chemistry, physics, and medicine. Not like history, law, art, or business.
  • Research methods are systematic scientific approaches to answering questions. Example: reading an EEG during dreams instead of just asking people if they dreamed.

Common sense

  • Common sense is often wrong. Left-brained vs right-brained thinking is a myth.
  • "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" and "out of sight, out of mind" both sound true. They can't both be right.
  • Common sense uses a small amount of experience and only "knows" after the fact.
  • Cognitive unconscious is the part of the mind we are not aware of. It is not open to introspection.
Psychology's four goals Part 1

Psychologists want to benefit humanity. They do that through four goals, in this order.

  • Description: naming and classifying based on a detailed record of scientific observations. Uses statistics. Asks "what is the nature of this behavior?"
  • Understanding: being able to state the causes of a behavior. Asks "why does it occur?"
  • Prediction: forecasting behavior accurately. Asks "can we forecast when it will occur?"
  • Control: altering the conditions that affect behavior. Asks "what conditions affect it?"
Class example: suicide. Description finds that more women attempt it but more men die from it. Understanding asks why (depression, lack of connection, different methods). Prediction tries to forecast who is at risk. Control changes conditions: counseling, medication, connection to loved ones, and removing access to means.

To reach these goals, psychologists must use critical thinking and the scientific method.

Scientific observation and the scientific method Part 1

Scientific observation

An empirical investigation structured to answer questions about the world in a systematic and intersubjective way. "Let's take a direct look."

  • Empirical evidence: information gained from direct observation.
  • Systematic: carefully planned.
  • Intersubjective: observations can be reliably confirmed by multiple observers.

The six steps of the scientific method

  • 1. Making observations. Review published results. Think about everyday life and current problems. Example: do long-distance relationships last?
  • 2. Defining a problem. Clearly state the question. What factors matter? Age, gender, length of relationship, distance, personality.
  • 3. Proposing a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a verifiable predicted outcome, an educated guess about the relationship between variables. The question is turned into an operational definition: defining a concept by the specific actions or procedures used to measure it.
  • 4. Gathering evidence / testing the hypothesis. Measure the factors before the relationship goes long-distance. Follow up at 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year. Ask how committed they feel. Count how many break up and why.
  • 5. Building a theory. A theory is a system of ideas that interrelates concepts and facts, summarizes existing data, and predicts future observations. Theories guide future research. Without them we would just have disconnected facts.
  • 6. Publishing results. Science is useless unless it is public. Results go in peer reviewed professional journals so other researchers can scrutinize, replicate, and extend the findings.
Critical thinking Part 1

We get tricked all the time: urban legends, astrology, psychics, healing crystals, herbalists. Critical thinking is a type of reflection that supports beliefs through scientific explanation and observation.

Principles of critical thinking

  • Few truths transcend the need for logical analysis and empirical testing. Religious beliefs and personal values are matters of faith. Everything else should be evaluated with logic, evidence, and the scientific method.
  • Authority or claimed expertise does not make an idea true or false. A sincere teacher, guru, or celebrity can still be wrong. Ask "is this a well supported explanation?"
  • Judging the quality of evidence is crucial. Think like a juror. Quality matters more than quantity.
  • Critical thinking requires an open mind. New evidence can change your thinking, but don't be gullible. Carl Sagan called this a balance between skeptical scrutiny and openness to new ideas.
  • The power of falsification. Ask what it would take to prove a "truth" false.

Falsification and its enemies

  • Falsification: the deliberate attempt to uncover how a commonsense belief or scientific theory might be false. "All swans are white" until you find one black swan.
  • Admitting you are wrong is hard, even for scientists. Everyone needs to be prepared for it.
  • Uncritical acceptance: believing claims because they seem true or because it would be nice if they were true. Horoscopes work this way: flattering and general enough to fit anyone.
  • Confirmation bias: noticing or remembering things that confirm our expectations and ignoring the rest.
  • Superstition: an unfounded belief held without objective evidence or in the face of falsifying evidence. Jinxing your team, astrology, graphology.
Research ethics Part 1
  • The main rule: avoid harming participants.
  • IRB (Internal Review Board) reviews research before it happens.
  • APA (American Psychological Association) publishes ethical guidelines.
  • Three infamous studies led to these rules being formalized.

Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932 to 1972)

  • 399 African American men with syphilis and 201 without. Promised free medical care.
  • Supposed to last 6 months. Lasted 40 years.
  • Penicillin became the treatment in 1947. It was never given to them.
  • Leaked to the press. 28 died directly from syphilis, about 100 from complications, 40 wives were infected, 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.

Milgram's obedience study (1961, Hartford, CT)

  • Wanted to know why "normal" people did terrible things, like working in Holocaust death camps.
  • Question: how far will people go in obeying an instruction if it involves hurting another person?
  • Involved deception and caused distress.

Stanford Prison Experiment (Philip Zimbardo)

  • Tested whether prisoners are bad because of who they are or because of the situation.
  • Students were randomly assigned to be prisoners or guards. Guards worked 8 hour shifts. Prisoners were only called by number.
  • Planned for 21 days. Ended after 3 days, mostly at the urging of Zimbardo's grad student (and girlfriend).
  • Prisoners rebelled. Guards withheld food and forced them to do harmful things. Zimbardo pushed the guards to treat prisoners worse.
  • One prisoner had a "mental breakdown" but later said he faked it to get out.

Basic ethical guidelines

  • Do no harm. Describe risks accurately. Make sure participation is voluntary.
  • Minimize discomfort. Maintain confidentiality. Do not unnecessarily invade privacy.
  • Use deception only when absolutely necessary, and remove any misconceptions afterward (debriefing).
  • Provide results and interpretations to participants. Treat them with dignity and respect.
  • Design good research so time and resources are not wasted.
A brief history of psychology Part 2
  • People have tried to explain human behavior for thousands of years.
  • Phrenology: judging personality by feeling bumps on the skull. Pseudoscience.
  • Wilhelm Wundt (1832 to 1920) is the father of psychological science.

Early schools of thought

  • Structuralism (Europe): tried to understand consciousness by breaking it into parts.
  • Functionalism (America): how behavior and mental abilities help people adapt to their environment. Led to applied psychology, like educational psychology (improving learning) and industrial psychology (studying how people work).
  • Behaviorism (America): only looks at overt, observable behavior.
  • Gestalt: German for "form, pattern, or whole."

Psychoanalytic psychology (Europe)

  • Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) focused on the parts of the mind beyond awareness: conflicts, impulses, desires.
  • Mental life is like an iceberg. Only a small part shows.
  • Many unconscious thoughts are repressed (held out of awareness). They leak out in dreams or slips of the tongue (Freudian slips).
  • Freud believed all thoughts, emotions, and actions are determined. Nothing is by accident. This is the opposite of behaviorism: internal thoughts cause behavior.
  • Psychoanalysis: Freud's therapy that explores unconscious conflicts. The "talking cure."
  • Neo-Freudian: accepts the broad features of Freud's theory but revises it. Less focus on sex and aggression.

Humanistic psychology (1950s and 1960s)

  • Focuses on human experiences, problems, potentials, and ideals. Does not believe we are ruled by unconscious forces.
  • Determinism: all behavior has prior causes that would fully explain our choices if we knew them all.
  • Free will: humans are capable of making their own choices. Humanists stress needs for love, self-esteem, belonging, self-expression, creativity, and spirituality.
Modern psychology and who gets studied Part 2

Cognitive behaviorism and cognitive psychology (1960s onward)

  • Behaviorism was too extreme. It turned into cognitive behaviorism: behavioral principles combined with cognition (perception, thinking, anticipation) to explain behavior.
  • Cognitive psychology explains covert mental processes such as thinking, feeling, problem solving, perception, and language, and how these influence behavior.

Bias in who gets studied

  • Gender bias in research is a real problem.
  • Edward Tolman noted that most psychology research is based on rats and college sophomores.
  • WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Most participants fit this. Can we generalize findings outside this group?
  • Big Five personality traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Extraversion (OCNAE).